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He had only come home to say goodbye.
The funeral had been that morning, and Percival had scattered her ashes in the yellow fields of Iksay until there was nothing left of her for him to hold. The sky was the same crisp orange and gold of the Zexen uniform he was not wearing. His mother had loved the village with all her heart, and he knew that she would like nothing better to spend eternity on the wind above it.
He felt awkward without his armor. Percival was no stranger to funerals, but it was odd to feel the stares on the back of his neck and know they wanted something more than a stoic expression. With a small shudder, he realized that he had forgotten how to mourn.
The mud caked under his boots and the gentle smell of wet earth still felt like home. It bothered him. Still, he remembered the feeling of the rough-hewn wood of the old windmill fence pressed against his arms and the moon hanging low and lonely in the clear country sky. Even the splinters were a familiar pain.
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His mother was a kind, ordinary woman with dull brown hair and rosy cheeks. She loved to bake, and Percival could remember watching her knead dough every morning. Sometimes, when he was lucky, she would let him help. He could remember feeling the dough find every gap between his fingers, filling him up with something warm his mother made.
One heavy summer afternoon Percy chased an old crooked hoop through the fields outside of town. That was when they came riding, faceless and unrelenting, the sun glaring fiercely off their exquisitely polished armor. At first he thought they were monsters-- something sharp and strange. As they rode closer, he decided they must have angels, for nothing evil or ugly could shine as bright as they did. He stood rapt as they rode on towards the village, emblazoning his thoughts like a cross on a shield. When it was time for dinner, he left his hoop somewhere in the fields. It was a week before he even remembered to look for it.
Percival did not find out the truth about the knights until he asked the old man who lived up the street. Then he was rushing home, his face awash in late-afternoon sun, to tell his mother that he wanted to be one of them. Her voice caught as she reminded him that his father had died a nameless soldier in a skirmish six months before he was born. Face red with tears and frustration, she begged him to change his mind. But Percival was nine, and she was his mother. After six months of him asking why, the answer became too hard for her to give. So when Percy turned twelve and his mother had saved enough money washing neighbors' clothes, he left to become a knight.
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He was good at it, but then, he knew he would be. The wooden sword they gave him for practice wasn't so much different from the sticks he used to chase hoops, and he already knew how to ride a horse. Magic took some practice, but he learned what it felt like to have a rune engraved on his right hand and how to cast spells with head bowed to blade. The hard part was learning not to ask questions. But that, too, was a lesson learned well enough with time.
When he met the other boys at the academy, it was clear to him that they were different. For one thing, they all had two names. What they belonged to was not a place or a person, but a legacy, a lineage. The words "honor" and "pride" felt strange on his lips, and when he spoke them aloud they did not sound convincing. Percival was just Percival. But he learned to cover the dirt on his feet with an easy arrogance and a lazy sort of smile. And when Galahad finally gave him his last name, it seemed to fit.
Percival couldn't remember exactly how he and Borus had become friends, but it had something to do with the bottle of a cheap local vintage they snuck one night from the castle kitchens. Percival had never tasted real wine before, but he pretended the burning sensation in his throat was a familiar one. But Borus was no amateur, and he held the goblet like someone who knew how. He just kept pouring and Percy tried to keep his armor on and his expression easy. Too late, Percy realized that this was not how wine worked. As his composure wavered, the chink in the armor was exposed. Borus had always been the quicker with a sword.
"Why do you want to be a knight?" At the academy, it was a simple question, the sort recruits woke up to every morning. Percival had long since memorized a speech about honor and Zexen pride, because he could not tell his captain that he yearned for it like spring crops did for rain. He could not say that, once upon a time, something brilliant and merciless had come riding through his childhood and had taken him with it. But he said this all to Borus, with a drunken conviction he would not be able to wave away in the morning. And the curious thing was that Borus did not laugh or smile or look away in shared and awkward silence but instead raised his glass to some lingering above that neither of them could see. And that night, though the lines of his vision weren't as straight as they should've been, Percival realized that they might be chasing after the same thing.
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When they met Chris, he was sure of it.
She attended the Zexen anniversary gala, but she did not wear a dress and she did not dance. He was sure that Borus could only see how straight she stood and the strange color of her eyes in the candlelight. But Percival fell in love when her composure broke and the Lady Lightfellow slapped Lilly Pendragon across the face.
He hadn't brought her to Iksay to seduce her, exactly— what he had planned was more a declaration of faith. He would tell her the whole stupid story and maybe she would finally become something he could feel. But that was the day the Lizard-king invaded, the day his home became a wasteland. It was lucky that Chris never did take off her armor. As the embers touched his cheeks with their small fire, he saw that her hair shone the same white-silver as those first knights. Percival was so caught up in the sight of her that he didn't notice the tall blond man whose face was bunched up in half of a wink. And by the time he did, it was too late. She was gone, and he had learned long ago not to ask questions.
He had tried to come home then, to rebuild his barren village and to taste his mother's bread. It had been nice, for a while, to wear colors besides orange and gold, to go out in the rain without worrying if he would rust. Iksay was still cheerful, and its citizens worked hard to make it as beautiful as it had been before that burning. But Percival was not like the other villagers. He had two names, now, all the unquiet spaces that came with them. The girls in the village were pretty and affable, but when he felt them warm beneath his hands, he knew they were not enough. After a few years in Iksay, Percival was eager to return to his armor, and he left when the first whispers of war made their way through the wheat.
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A few months later, Borus was shot in the leg by an enemy arrow fighting on the Zexen-Tinto border. Percival rode to his friend with all the speed his reputation could lend him, fearing it would not be enough. When Percival finally reached his side, Borus was staring at something in the sky that he could not quite make out. His friend was gesturing so frantically at the sun behind the clouds that Percival forgot about his right-hand rune and the incantation that would remove the wound from his leg. Mercifully, Chris was right behind him, and she was a better healer than he could ever hope to be. She drew a sign with her fingers and brought down ephemeral rain from some high place inside of her, and it fit into the wound like his mother's dough had fit between his fingers. But Borus kept staring at whatever he saw in the sky. He did not get up until nightfall.
Time passed, and one day Borus met a new girl, a redheaded noblewoman who could hold her liquor and make him laugh. After two years, they were married. At the bachelor party, when Borus was drunk out of his mind and Percy was no longer an amateur, he longed to ask what his friend had seen that day on the battlefield. It seemed cheap to do it then, so he vowed to ask the next day, when they were both sober. And then he kept putting it off, for weeks and for months, until it became one of those things he was content not to know.
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The night air was warm and it clung to him like sweat. It would be a good summer for the crops, he couldn't help but think. Percival Fraulein had been leaving Iksay all his life. But the dirt under his feet had never told him a lie; like the moral of a story, Iksay was something he could never leave.
So he stood alone, bound by the twin prisons of love and chivalry, the taste of his mother's bread inexplicably filling the back of his throat. Chris was like the town, he decided, always moving but never changing, circling and burning in a place just out of reach. He wondered why, after all these years, she was still something he could not touch. Percival did not expect an answer, but it came to him nonetheless.
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When Percy was still a child, before the knights came and Iksay burned, he had a neighbor called Edward whose mother made delicious stew. Percy knew that it was tasty because he could smell it outside their house some afternoons, but Ed would prattle on about it for longer than it took his mother to make. Eventually, Percival got so tired of hearing about the taste and not tasting that he decided to take up arms. "Ma," he had said, "Why don't we ever have stew for dinner?"
"Don't be silly," she had answered, smiling even as she chided him. "Because you never asked."